


The King's Work

by Vaznetti



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: 19th Century Medicine, Adventures in Faerie, M/M, Period-Typical Racism, daring rescues, minor hurt-comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:07:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21839434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/pseuds/Vaznetti
Summary: Magic may have returned to England, but Stephen Black has not.  Childermass is sent to find him.
Relationships: John Childermass/Stephen Black
Comments: 12
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	The King's Work

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notkingyet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notkingyet/gifts).



Excerpt from a letter from John Segundus to John Childermass:

_...my disappointment that Sir Walter's political friends can do so little for Lady Pole. With the North in such an Uproar, they say, they have no choice but to deal with John Uskglass, or with those who claim to Represent him. The fate of a Negro Manservant, no matter how helpful he had been, can count as little in such circumstances as These! Lady Pole has said that if they will not help her she will return to Faerie herself, to bring back her faithful friend and the Sole Companion of her years of Torment..._

This letter, having been sent as far as Nottingham by the carriers of the southern King's post, went from there to York in a packet sent to the secretary of the Society of Magicians there. He put it away until its owner should call for it. But after two weeks a carter appeared, who said he was going to Pickering, where Childermass had been seen inspecting a large chasm which had opened in the earth, from which flames and smoke arose daily at 3 o'clock. Childermass was no longer there, but a tinker, who had heard that Childermass would address a crowd in Whitby three days hence, agreed to take it to him there. The tinker, however, stopped to work for a day in Grosmont Priory, and arrived only after Childermass had left that place. But a young gentleman of the town, who wished to learn more of magic from a man who had known both Jonathan Strange and Gilbert Norrell, told him that Childermass was going to speak to the aldermen of Northallerton and that he himself would follow shortly; and the young man kept his word and delivered the letter to Childermass, when he found him in the town hall.

Childermass read it, frowned, and folded it back up. He took the last page and wrote on it crosswise: _Do not let her. I will go myself and find him._. "Take this to John Segundus in London," he told the young man from Whitby. "If you cannot find him, then take it to Lady Pole."

"But I am here to study magic, not carry letters!" the young man protested.

Childermass stared at him a long moment; his mouth curled into a smile pulled all askew by the scar on his cheek. "You are here to do the King's work, as are we all." The young man's face turned red; he took the letter with a sharp bow, and was in such a hurry to be on his way that he did not hear Childermass laughing as the door swung shut. "The King's work indeed," he muttered, and sighed to himself. He needed to be in Newcastle, and he did not think that if he went via Faerie he was likely to be there in time.

The young man from Whitby made as much haste as he could going south, and in London found the lodgings of John Segundus without great difficulty. But he has been too late already when he started: Lady Pole, whose loathing for magic was exceeded only by her sense of justice and obligation, had found a spell and stepped through a mirror, and set out already on the King's Roads to find her friend.

\---

From Northallerton the road ran north toward Durham and Newcastle; Childermass knew that an old road branched out a few miles over the river Tee, and that it was said to have led lead back to York through three Faerie kingdoms. He had no way of knowing how likely he was to find Stephen Black, or news of him, in any of them, and it was not the direction he needed to go. Still, when he came to the crossroads, he turned Brewer to the west, and took him through a gap in a crumbling stone wall and out of the human world.

The fairy road wound its way up a hill, and although the clouds had been pale and high when Childermass took it, as he reached the top of the hill he looked behind to see the English road and the river behind it hidden in a dense low mist. He turned away and rode on: the hills changed around him, steep and rocky on one side, falling in a sheer cliff to the other. After a time the road began to run downhill, until it levelled out in a wood of twisted scrubby trees with grey bark and grey leaves. As he went on the trees grew taller and taller, their trunks long and straight, their branches reaching up into the sky, black leaves whispering together in a language he felt he could almost understand. Brewer began to move more and more slowly, though Childermass himself was hardly aware of it, so intent he was on listening to the trees. One or two began, as he passed, to dip their branches down toward his head, so that the whispering of the leaves grew louder; he almost thought he saw mouths on the undersides of the leaves as they twisted back and forth in the still air.

"I am looking for Stephen Black," he told them.

_Black_ , they whispered. _Black, black, black..._. A branch bent low enough to touch his face. " _Man, man, man..._

"Yes," Childermass said, reining in his horse. He himself was whispering as well. "A man, a black man. Did he come through here?"

" _Here..._ " the trees whispered. " _Here, here..._ " A second branch joined the first, and he saw that he was right, there were small mouths on the edge of the leaves, small mouths with small sharp teeth. He leaned close to see them better, and the branches bent even nearer, brushing the horse's head to get close to Childermass's face. Where they touched his coat it began to fray, and where they touched Brewer's hair they left scratches. The horse came to a halt, and the leaf nearest his left ear closed upon it.

Blood dripped down his coat and Brewer reared up and plunged right, galloping forwards through the trees. Time started again for Childermass as well, as Brewer ran on and he grit his teeth and clutched the reins, trying only not to lose his seat. Branches kept reaching down to them, ripping at his coat and Brewer's as they ran on; his hat went flying behind him and had he been the sort of man to wear a wig he would have lost that as well. There was no stopping the horse as he ran through the hanging branches which clutched and bit at them as they fled: finally they broke into a long clearing and Brewer slowed to a walk, his sides heaving, his head down. Childermass slipped out of the saddle, clutching it to help stay upright on shaking legs. There were shallow cuts and scratches on Brewer's flanks and neck, but his legs seemed sound. His own hands left streaks of blood on the horse's sweat-blacked hair, and when he was done the two of them leaned against each other, while he stared back at the wood through which they had come. The trees stood tall again, reaching to the sky, the leaves still in the still air. The road they had come on lay somewhere back in in that wood, but Childermass knew without a doubt that the horse would never do it. 

Once Brewer cropped a bit of grass and eaten an apple from the saddlebag that Childermass had hoped to save for himself, he took up the reins and led him on. The horse checked and shivered as they went forward into the next part of the forest, but the trees here seemed greener, and were spaced further apart. After no more than an hour's walk they began to break up, and Childermass came out onto a sloping green hillside. At the bottom, in the distance, was a tall tower rising from the trees that filled the valley below them, and beyond that, the brown trace of a road cutting up the hills opposite.

Something about the tower made Childermass uneasy, but they needed some kind of road; he had no intention of wandering through the fairy lands forever. He stared down while he and Brewer shared another apple, and Childermass finished an end of bread while the horse grazed, and then he tightened the saddle, mounted up and rode down the slope. At the edge of the wood he dismounted again: now he knew why it had made him uneasy. He frowned at the thorn trees, and the bodies he could see hanging on them further in, and the grey slow serpents curled around their trunks. He shivered, and Brewer shivered under his hand; they walked further on, away from the tower. There seemed no change in the wood, though, so Childermass stopped to get his pistols out; he didn't like the way he thought the snakes were watching him. As he unbuckled the saddlebag, someone screamed. 

Brewer reared up under his hands, knocking Childermass back and leaving him empty-handed as the horse galloped back up the hill the way they had come. Childermass was tempted to follow -- maybe Brewer would find a better way out -- but a second scream made him turn and enter the woods. A woman's voice, followed by a crash; then a pistol shot and another crash. Childermass started to run.

He could hear the woman before he could see her. "You!" A crash. "You coward! Damn you!" Another shriek of rage, and then another crash. The bones hanging from the trees bumped at his shoulders as he passed them, he hoped not because they were starting to move on their own. He came, as before, to the clearing in front of the castle, where the scene was like something from a puppet play: a woman in a fashionable dress and coat beating a ragged gentleman around the head and shoulders with a broken umbrella.

He recognised Lady Pole at once -- this time, he thought sourly, her aim had clearly not been so true -- but it took him longer to recognise the man she was attacking not as the soldier he had met but as Lascelles. His hair was disheveled and dusty, his wig askew, his coat in rags, and he had a bruise, perhaps from the umbrella, spreading across his jaw. He staggered into one of the corpses, after yet another blow, and it dropped a sword into his hand, a long handled medieval thing, but as he caught it, Lascelles straightened. "I am the Champion of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart," he said, raising the sword as if to strike at Lady Pole. "You will not steal away my lady!"

Childermass got there just in time to pull Lady Pole out of danger. She struggled against him. "Let me go!" she cried. "Kidnapper! Traitor!" 

"No!" Childermass said, "Leave him!" He began to pull her out of the clearing, but he did not have much experience manhandling well-born ladies and she surprised him with her strength, elbowing him in the gut and racing away, not to Lascelles but across the stream to pull at the tower door. Lascelles kept his eyes on Childermass, raising the sword again. "You are here to challenge me," he said. "You are here to steal away my lady!" Childermass looked around for a weapon, but the thorns caught at his coat. The serpents were twisting along the trunks and up the branches of the thorn-trees. He ducked behind one as the sword came down, cutting through the serpent and sticking in the wood long enough for Childermass to pull an axe from a decaying leather belt. The wood shattered when Lascelles' sword came down on it again, and the axe-head went flying. Lascelles stabbed forward and Childermass scrambled backward until he backed into a hanging skeleton. He reached for one of the leg bones -- it would be better than nothing -- when a sharp pain struck his shoulder, and his ears filled with hissing. The serpent wrapped around him, pinning him to the tree; Lascelles raised his sword once more.

The ground shook: a stone fell from the tower, and then another, then a third, as Lady Pole dragged a figure back out the door. From the front she was a woman with long blonde braids, dressed in a white shift, but her face was covered in the same grey scales as the serpent, and as she struggled in Lady Pole's grip Childermass saw that the Lady of the Plucked Eye and Heart had a snake's tail instead of legs. Both Lascelles and the serpent abandoned Childermass to turn on Lady Pole, who had her arm around the other lady's neck and was dragging her across the stream. Childermass ignored the numbness in his shoulder and arm, and brought the bone he was holding down on Lascelles' head.

The Lady of the Castle of the Plucked Eye and heart cried out something in a language full of hissing: her mouth was full of long sharp teeth. The snakes responded, twisting down the trees onto the ground, hissing to match their mistress.

Childermass stumbled forward, and he and Lady Pole met in the middle of the stream, falling against each other. "Run," he said, but she was already dragging him away down the streambed. The ground to either side was full of great grey serpents. He used the bone awkwardly to beat away one which was twisting down from an overhanging branch as they splashed on, Lady Pole tripping over her skirt and Childermass trying not to think of the venom spreading down his side. He heard human feet among the rustling snakes behind them, and horse's hooves ahead. _Brewer_ , he thought, if they could reach the horse surely they could ride away.

"Stand and fight," Lascelles shouted behind them. "If you don't stand still I will shoot you in the back like the cowardly servant you are!" The hooves were getting closer, but instead of Brewer's solid brown form Childermass saw pale horses with white-haired riders. Lady Pole had stopped moving and was turning around to shout something at Lascelles; Childermass turned as well and saw the other man raising the pistol and aiming. He pushed Lady Pole behind him as Lascelles fired, and they fell back together into the water. His side was no longer numb, and his coat smelled burnt. The water was pink. Childermass opened his mouth to say, "Again?" but the water covered his head and filled his mouth.

He was pulled spluttering from the water by pale fairy hands and dark human ones, each cough turning the world around his fuzzy and grey. Lady Pole was frowning down at him, the cold water dripping from her hair onto his face keeping him awake; they were moving he thought, some kind of carriage flying forward under a pearl-white sky. The carriage shook and he coughed and suddenly his whole side felt like it was on fire, his whole side except for the shoulder and the arm he couldn't feel. He struggled to sit up, blinking away at the blackness that clouded his sight. Lady Pole was holding his hand. He couldn't feel her fingers. She was saying something he couldn't hear as the white trees under the white sky flew past them. Where, he wondered, had all the snow come from.

Jolting agony woke him when he was lifted from the carriage: it felt like something was ripping his side with sharp teeth. He clenched his teeth to keep from screaming. There was a tall black man, giving orders to the fairies to carry him inside; Childermass braced himself for more pain but instead he felt nothing at all: his arm was gone, his shoulder, his whole side, and he felt himself thinning out, as if his whole body was turning into mist. The fairy at his head looked down at him, and touched Childermass on the forehead; when he lifted his fingers the world went black.

Childermass woke again on a narrow bed under a flat slate ceiling. The black man was standing by Childermass's side with a pair of long shears in one hand and the scraps of Childermass' shirt and coat in the other. He tried to struggle but found he couldn't move: there was another fairy, this one with powder blue hair drawn up into the shape of a ghostly three-masted ship. The black man put down the rags and shears and took up a pair of silver tongs.

He remembered this from the last time he was shot. "Black..." he said hoarsely.

"Yes, that was my name. Hold still now." He bent down to look more closely at Childermass' side.

"...found you..."

"Yes, you found me, you and Lady Pole. She is fine." He touched the silver tongs to the wound in Childermass's side. There was no pain, not even coldness from the metal. "There we go; the ball only scored your side. Bring me some water, please." A fairy in a dress the colour of fresh grass and hair to match stood by him with a cloth and basin. "Hold on," Black said, "there is not much more to do."

The fairy with the three-masted hair opened Childermass's mouth and placed something on his tongue. Then he bent down, put his own mouth over Childermass's and pushed whatever it was deeper into his throat. He tried to struggle, to raise his left arm to push the fairy off, but Black was on that side, clutching his hand tightly. "Hold still," he said again. "We need to draw the poison from your side before it reaches your heart." The fairy lifted his mouth and a maroon cloud filled the space between their mouths; he could feel something being pulled from his body as the cloud grew and grew and tried to sink back into his throat. Something was blocking it: he tried to breathe, to cough, but he was frozen. Stephen Black leaned down and blew at the cloud: it lingered a moment longer, floating more and more thinly above Childermass's face, and then was gone.

As it disappeared, the fire came back; Childermass tried to twist away from it, but Black was holding him down. The fairy touched his eyes with long pale fingers, and he slept.

Childermass did not know how long he lay in the dark. Sometimes he heard voices: Lady Pole asked, "but here, in Lost-Hope?" and Black's voice answered, "...no happier there than here." Later on they seemed to talk of housekeeping: something about cobwebs dusted away, and new paper on the walls, and someone being crushed by a great pile of stones. Lady Pole was still there, saying "...never want to attend a ball again, but I see I will have to hold one. There is no other way for a woman to have any influence. How they ignore me!" Her skirts rustled as she paced by his bed, and he slept again to the sound of her footsteps.

Before he opened his eyes Childermass thought that he was waking up in his old bed at Hurtfew Abbey: the sheets were smooth and the bed firm, and the room smelled fresh. But then he remembered Lady Pole pacing, by his bed. It was impossible that she had been there; it was impossible for anyone to pace in his tiny room. He sat up in a room much grander than he had ever slept in: he was in a tall wide four-poster bed, and there was a Turkish carpet on the floor, a fire burning bright in the grate, and heavy blue curtains over the windows. The cover on the bed was made of the same velvet, there were candlesticks with new candles, and by the bed was a stand with a basin, a jug and a crystal glass. The walls were covered in blue and white paper which Childermass had surely seen in some London drawing room, and by the fire were chairs and a small table. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed, expecting to wince at the pain, but felt nothing except where the wound in his side stretched under the bandage. His shoulder was bandaged as well, and the cuts on his hands had been cleaned. Other than that, he was naked.

He looked around for a robe, or a wardrobe -- surely gentlemen always had a robe to hand -- and saw more and more that seemed odd: the fire glowed and the room was warm, but the flames themselves did not move. The room was bright enough to see everything clearly, although the curtains were drawn and the candles not yet lit. The light seemed to come from all around the walls and ceiling, confusing the shadow he left on the bed. And the bed-post under his hand was not dead wood, but living: he saw the roots leading down into the floor. 

More damned trees, he thought. He tried to pour water from the jug but had not realised how weak his shoulder was: it slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor. The door swung open and Black stood there, in a claret coat and with a silver circle on his brow. "You should not be out of bed." Behind him came two fairies, tall and pale, dressed incongruously in the clothes of a maid and valet. The valet took a robe -- and where had that been, Childermass wondered -- and helped him to sit into one of the chairs by the eerily still fire. The maid went to straighten the bedding, and then to open the curtains: the wooden frames were large and modern, but they were filled not with panes of glass but with slate. At Black's nod she drew them closed again. "I cannot yet quite control the house enough to give you windows," he said as the valet placed a tray on the table. "It is only broth," Black said, "but it is safe for you to drink. I oversee the kitchens here myself."

"Why am I in this room?" Childermass asked. "This is a gentleman's room."

"I thought you would be comfortable here," Black said. He nodded to the valet, who began to bring the spoon up to Childermass's mouth. He grabbed it and began to feed himself instead. The broth was in fact very good. "Who is Brewer?"

"What?"

"You asked after him, while you were injured."

"My horse," Childermass said. "He ran off before the fight began. And ugly brown thing, but he showed more sense than I did. I thought he had come back to me, at the Castle of the Plucked Eye and Heart, but it was you instead."

"I will have my people look for him." He looked at the fire, and the flames began to dance as if they were real.

Childermass looked at the room, the fine English room, and the fairy maid and fairy valet. "What are you, in this place?"

Black smiled sadly. "I am their king."

"Like John Uskglass," Childermass murmured. Despite the fire he felt cold. "Will you take your army and make a kingdom in England too, then?"

"What?" Stephen looked horrified. "Never! Besides, I will never return to England. This is my place now."

"A kingdom where servants stay in grand rooms?" Childermass smiled.

"Why not?" Black said. "The people here do not care what colour my skin is, or who your parents were."

"So Lady Pole was wrong, and you do not need to be rescued. Just as well: we did a piss-poor job of it. I should have gone straight to Newcastle. Now the society of magicians there will have met without me, and who knows what they will have decided."

"Must you go?"

"I must. This is not the only place we servants have ideas above our station: the whole of Enlgand is alive with magic. In the North laundrymaids are finding spells written on the washwater and shepherds in the clouds, and in the towns there are glassmakers and cloth-merchants and apprentices all waiting for John Uskglass to return. They will declare his kingdom without him if he waits too much longer to appear, and damned to the lords in all their fine houses and their Parliament in London."

"I am beginning to see why we never met at the Peep-O'Day-Boys," Stephen said. "You would be damned for a revolutionary Frenchman."

"These thoughts are only revolutionary in London," Childermass said firmly. "Come back with me, and you will see the world on its head."

"Finish your soup first," Black said. "Tom Antlers here will help you dress, and take you down to supper. Lady Pole and I will wait for you." He turned and left: the valet bowed, and the maid followed him out.

The valet, who did have antlers growing from his curly black hair, shaved Childermass with a curved bronze blade, and dressed him in a white shirt and fine blue coat, and new trousers that fit as if they had been made for him. He tied the cravat around Childermass' neck as well as any London valet: it was a shifting green like the sea, and finer than any cloth Childermass had ever seen. Everything was. "I am not a gentleman," he told him.

The valet inspected him and said only, "Come. The king is waiting below." He took up a candlestick that flared into life in his hands, and led Childermass out.

Childermass had lived many many years in Hurtfew Abbey, and was used to a house that had something of the labyrinth about it, but the house of Stephen Black confused even him; they left the room and entered a modern hallway: down a flight of worn stone stairs was a wood-panelled room, and then a great stone cave, and a tunnel that seemed to lead twisting upwards but was at times so low that Childermass had to duck his head. Rooms seemed a jumble of all ages and of none: he walked over dirt floors, carpets, wooden boards, and rushes, and under ceilings of painted wood and stone slabs, sometimes flat and sometimes in gothic arches. At length Tom Antlers opened a door and led him into a dining room in the modern style, with a fine wooden table and chairs covered in the same green silk that papered the walls. Stephen Black sat at the head of the table, with Lady Pole by his side.

"At last, Mr. Childermass!" she said. "Perhaps you can make him listen."

"I have already told him that I am not going back to England," said Black.

The valet held out the chair on Black's other side. Childermass sat gingerly, and stared at the expanse of silverware stretched out before him. The valet poured wine for him, and other fairies brought in dish after dish -- some that he recognised, like a roast goose, and a plate of eggs and spinach, and others that did not even look like food, like the platter with a miniature forest growing from it, or a clear glass bowl of orange jelly, with small fish suspended in it. Stephen took a little of everything (except the suspended fish) but allowed Childermass and Lady Pole to be served only a few of the dishes. Lady Pole ignored the food, picking a flower out of one of the fairy plates and plucking the petals one by one. "Can you really say that you are happy here?"

"Can you say the same of yourself in London?" Black asked.

"I am certainly happy to be away from this place, no matter how much you have changed it! I cannot forget how unhappy we all were in these halls. But it is true that in London I am often angry. Sir Walter refuses to listen to me; the spell is broken but it is as if he cannot understand what I am trying to tell him. And my mother talks to me of nothing but fashion and how to lead it, and the dinners and balls I must host, and how much time has been lost..." She sighed. "And how can I care about balls? I have tried to tell Stephen how much England has changed."

"Enough for you to invite the king of Lost-Hope to one of your balls?" Black asked.

"I would! And anyone who objects can... can go hang!" She spoke with great satisfaction. "And you too, Mr. Childermass, although I see that you are laughing at me. Let people complain. Consider how much praise Mr. Norrell received for rescuing me from death, when really he damned me. It was you and Mr. Segundus who truly helped me, and Stephen most of all. He killed the one who was king here before."

"And that is why I cannot return," Black said. "These are my people now, and I have a responsibility to shape them."

"Into what?" Childermass asked. "Englishmen and women?" He gestured to the room around them: the damask walls, the modern wooden table, the lamps, the silver and porcelain. "Are you trying to turn this into another great house to run?"

"No," Black said. "I said before, I thought you would be more comfortable. Look!" The damask walls faded, and they sat now at a long trestle table, with Black at the top in a raised throne, a silver crown on his head. Torches flared along the walls and were lost in the darkness under the high roof, and all around them, at other long tables, sat the people of Lost-Hope. Childermass saw the fairy with the three-masted ship for hair, and the pale fairy knights who rode to rescue him and Lady Pole, and the maid still in her black dress drinking from a curved ram's horn. She raised it in a toast to them.

A bell began to toll, and Stephen stood. At the far end of the room the doors swung open and a man walked in, young, with long black hair. The people of Lost-Hope whispered to each other as he passed them, until he came to the trestle and sat down next to Childermass. Without saying a word he took his own knife and speared the goose, dragging it over and pulling off a leg to eat. He paused only to drain his wine and hold the glass out to be refilled. 

"You're different," he said to Black. His accent sounded rough and unfamiliar, and yet Childermass was sure he had heard it before, and not long ago either. Perhaps one of the old men he had met crossing the moors. "This is all different." He gestured at the room with the drumstick.

"I am the king here now," Black said.

"Aye, that I can see. But what do you want with my man here?" He gestured at Childermass with the duck leg.

"I am no one's man now," Childermass said. "Not any more."

"Is that so? So you defy me again, John Childermass. You give commands, but you do it in my name." Lady Pole was staring at the newcomer, and not, Childermass realised suddenly, because of his inability to use a fork. "Aye, you know my name," said John Uskglass. "You've served me all your life, and still I need you now."

"Me?" Childermass said.

"I have been walking the North," the Raven King said. "Much of it I know still, but much of it is new to me. There are men in York and Manchester, who say they are magicians, who keep their knowledge in other men's books and use their magic to turn wheels. You know how to talk to them, and the same with the lords down in London. You will talk to them for me."

"Me?" Childermass said again.

John Uskglass took another bite of goose, and then put down the meat and stood to look down at him. "You are already doing my work: do it in my name." He took up his wine and took a sip, then handed the glass to Childermass, who stood and drained it. When he put it down, his had was trembling slightly. "Remember me now," the Raven King said, taking his head between his hands. He kissed Childermass twice, once on each eye, and then touched his forehead. "Seneschal," he said. "In the morrow, go to Newcastle. You will find my house there."

The torches went out, and by the time Stephen Black caused them to burn again, and restored the dining room around them, the other king was gone. 

The rest of the meal passed in silence. Lady Pole, who seemed not entirely happy in the new hall, excused herself, and Childermass felt exhausted, as if he had worked a hard day, rather than risen only in time for supper. Black seemed to notice, and walked him back through the maze of corridors to his room himself.

The bedroom walls, as Childermass stepped through the door, seemed thinner than they had been. Beneath the paper the rough stone walls of the real house seemed trying to seep through, and the ceiling was stone again, not plaster. He turned back to look at Black. "It is your house," he said.

"It is your room," Black answered. "Whenever you with to return. The roads between England and Faerie are always open to the Raven King's seneschal."

Childermass winced. "Do not call me that, please. I am no more suited to be a seneschal than--"

"Than I am to be a king?"

Childermass looked at him: tall and handsome in his crown and coat. "You are lonely," he said suddenly. The truth was clear on Black's face. "Show me your room."

Black nodded, and the corridor spun them around until they faced a blank door of rough wooden planks. It opened at Black's nod, and he led Childermass into a room with an arched ceiling and rough stone walls. There were small windows here, and these looked out on the stars. The bed was in the centre of the room, piled with furs, and the floor was carpeted with green rushes.

"Come," said the man who had once been Stephen Black.

Childermass hesitated one last time. "I don't know if I can undo this neck-cloth," he said. "I have never had one so fine."

Stephen's fingers brushed the edges of the cloth, and he began to undo the knot. "It will obey me," he said. "All things do here."

Childermass leaned forward enough to kiss him. "All things?" he asked when they parted.

"All things," Stephen said, and led him to the bed.

end


End file.
